Rich White San Francisco Liberals Totally Supports Illegal Immigrants. It's Just They Want to Keep These Dirty Foreigners Out of Their Own Neighborhoods.

San Francisco is one of the most progressive cities in the nation, especially when it comes to national immigration. We believe so much in the natural right of people to join us here in America that we fought to keep our status as sanctuary city even in the face of being federally defunded for it. We pride ourselves on our rejection of plans to tighten immigration controls and deport undocumented immigrants. Yet take that same conversation to the local level and all bets are off. City meetings have become heated, divisive and prone to rhetoric where we openly discuss exactly which kinds of people we want to keep out of our city.

This is an ethically incoherent position. If we in San Francisco so strongly believe that national immigration is a human right, then it seems strange to block migration into our own neighborhoods.

Consider the San Francisco Board of Supervisors' decision to challenge the environmental review of a proposed housing project at 1515 Van Ness Ave. Despite the project's plan to rent 25 percent of its units at a below-market rate, many members of the neighborhood preservation group, Calle 24, expressed anger that the project might bring tech workers into the Latino Cultural District.

Or that members of the Forest Hill homeowners association opposed a project that would build affordable housing for seniors and the formerly homeless on a site now occupied by a church. One of the grievances aired was that it might bring mentally unstable or drug-addicted people into the neighborhood.

Both of these groups are reacting to the threat of change. In both cases, residents took it as a given that they were within their rights to control who lived in their neighborhoods.

Conservatives see national immigration as a privilege to carefully dole out. Liberals see immigration as a human right that needs to be protected. San Francisco progressives view living in certain neighborhoods as a privilege to be earned, and see nothing wrong with preventing certain groups of people from moving in, a traditionally conservative view.

Working theory: All people are actually nationalists. It's just that New Yorkers, DCers, and SFans have decided their "nation" is their own provincial dirty city.